alburycatalina
commented
1 year ago - Overall I found that the lesson could assist the reader more. When you start learning something, you really need to be taken by the hand (in a pedagogical way). All instructions should be clear, tell you what to do and present the results of the code that is asked to run. Sometimes it is not clear enough, although the section on data manipulation is actually really well done!
- There is a lack of explanation around R projects: what they are? Why working with them? What is a directory? How do I structure my R project with sub-folders? Also lack on guidance on how to set it up. (I have created a lesson on this for the CSO)
- We need screenshots. Some of our personas know nothing about R and might even be afraid of coding! Having pictures along side code to show the results of the code (or a step by step approach to set up a R project!!) might help them go forward in the training. Otherwise they might stop at the first line of code or at the first paragraph they will have to read 3 times to understand. I however recognise that the pictograms for tagging are useful.
- There is a lack of sub-headings to highlight the structure of the lesson. It starts with “Loading data” which includes the creation of R objects. The structure should follow the questions that were stated at the beginning of the lesson: Loading data, Creating R objects, Dataframes, Manipulation of dataframes, R as a Calculator (or Simple statistics with R), Plotting data, and then Installing Packages (I have a lesson ready for that if needed)
- There is a need for more exercises and maybe a “Challenge” for those who wants to go further? It is present in the data Manipulation but there could also be some for creating R objects.
- It might be worth adding another Chapter in the curriculum about “Data analyses” or “Data Manipulation” to regroup the basic manipulation you can do with R. So the section on “Data Manipulation” of “Analysing Patient Data” should be another separate chapter. There are several reasons for that: (i) it allows the lesson on fundamentals to not be too long so that people have the impression that they progress faster; (ii) it allows the chapter on “Data Manipulation” to be more complete with the addition of joining data or the pivoting which are extremely useful in our day-to-day job; (iii) it means that people really start super simple in the R Fundamentals and that encourages them to do more as it was very easy to start with; (iv) it would allow to re-structure a bit and have “R fundamentals” “Data Types” “Data Manipulation”. The idea is to avoid the issue that I noticed around already using the name of data types such as “vector” or “list” without explaining them. If there is a chapter “Data Types” before the Chapter “Data Manipulation” then it solves the problem of having to explain what they are. Do I make sense? For similar reasons, I think that “Plotting Data” of this Chapter should be removed and left for the Chapter “Plotting data” that we have later on.